


I Don't Know Why I Like You

by speakertone



Category: Homoerotic Misogyny (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Crushes, F/F, Friendship, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, anyone whos read forever gets it, anyway also issax pining roommates lol, but like. i did not want these clowns trying to hide a body, slutrio, sorry for murderbaiting the fan disc was upset that they dont kill someone, title from the wombats!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29380395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakertone/pseuds/speakertone
Summary: “Oh, and Lena, before you go, just wondering, do you have a crush on anyone?”Elena scowls. “None of your business, whore,” and the door slams shut in Issa’s face.-Maybe spending time around people who grate you so much can have its perks.
Relationships: Audrey Riverdale-Kuragin/Elena Kuragina (Homoerotic Misogyny)/Isabel "Issa" Banquo, Audrey Riverdale-Kuragin/Isabel "Issa" Banquo, Isabel "Issa" Banquo/Elena Kuragina (Homoerotic Misogyny), Isabel "Issa" Banquo/Max Theodore Enjolras (implied), Theo Pendragon/Orlando Tim (mentioned)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	I Don't Know Why I Like You

**Author's Note:**

> I got into a new fandom and wrote like (checks watch) 3k words in 2 hours so you can probably figuring out how that's going for me :') who am i to deny the annoying dark academia show its getting together fics
> 
> title from the wombats and go listen to the song bc it slaps!

There must be something about blood, Issa muses in the bathroom mirror, wiping at her bottom lip and watching her thumb smear the red across it like lipstick. 

Max, while talking emphatically about a production of Hamlet he and June were planning on staging that semester, had flung out an arm madly and hit Issa squarely in the lip, which she had, of course, waved off (it being an accident and all that), instead joking that she was getting in character- not that Max and June had even started casting, but given her last name she had her fingers crossed that she was a shoe-in for the ghost. In any case, Max had walked her to the restroom and (flustered and apologizing hastily) realized that he had forgotten to pick up an exam and rushed out, leaving her to stare at herself in the mirror, the taste of metal in her mouth.

She wasn’t one for fights, really- physical ones, anyway, as Lucy or Emma might pointedly remind her- and hadn’t got in any major trouble in the time since she’d transferred to Atrox, so the taste of blood wasn’t something she was all too accustomed to, outside of the odd instance of biting too hard on her tongue during class. She rests on the counter and smudges it some more. Perhaps the imagery of smeared lipstick would make her desirable, would make her prettier. She shifts, rubbing her calves together. 

When Audrey walks into the bathroom, she frowns and straightens her back.

“I met Elena in here, you know,” Audrey says, and Issa shakes her head, as though clearing her mind of the whiplash. 

“Why should I care? If you’re just here to wax poetic about how you met your-” the word sticks in her throat, even as a joke. “Your girlfriend, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Girlfriend?” Audrey seems startled, a hand touching lightly at her chest. “No, you must be mistaken, we aren’t dating. Unless you’re jealous and want in?”

Issa barks out a laugh. “You wish. I wouldn’t fit- too pretty.”

“Yeah, I suppose that Elena and I are both more ‘sexy’ than pretty,” Audrey says, earning a very pointed look. “Alright, that’s enough. Came in here to get some tissues for the club room.”

“Huh? Why? I made sure to replace the tissue box from last week.”

“Dieke spilled cola all over the floor while she was talking about… Ah, I hadn’t bothered to listen.”

“Hamlet?”

“No, no,” Audrey waves her hand. “The… The West hall? Emma slipped up, called it the Dest hall, something like that. It was dumb.”

“What? Topic changed already? I was only out for, like, 5 minutes.”

“10,” Audrey corrects, walking towards Issa. She reaches out to the wall behind her, and Issa shuts her eyes, expecting to be cornered, though it seems that it wasn’t within Audrey’s agenda today, snatching some paper towels from the dispenser behind her. “And you know how fast the club moves. Like whiplash.”

And then she’s gone, Issa biting her lip to taste the blood in her mouth.

-

“Max, do you have a crush on anyone? Like, right now?”

Issa hears Max shift from where he’s lying on the top bunk, his sheets rustling against each other as he contemplates the question.

“Uh, maybe. Why? Here, by the way.” A stuffed toy drops into her bed and she catches it, hugging it to her chest. The whale, the one they got as a “housewarming” gift from Tal. 

“I don’t know, I’ve just… Ugh, I don’t know, man, maybe I’m just curious. Tell me who you maybe have a crush on.”

“You have to tell me first.”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either!”

“Fess up, you’ve gotta be thinking of someone! Or I’ll claw my way up there and sock you in the lip to get you back for earlier.”

“I thought you said it was alright!”

“It was alright! But now I have an opportunity to get something out of my threats, so I’m gonna use it!”

Max starts laughing- Issa can see him in her mind’s eye, hand over his face as he tries to bury the noise he’s making into his pillow. The number of noise complaints they’ve gotten since moving dorms has been greater than their combined total grade in their math classes, although, she muses, that’s not exactly a high bar to reach. When Max calms down, he pokes his head down from his bunk to look at her, grinning.

“So?”

“So what?”

“Who is it? Who’re you thinking of?”

“I’m thinking of punching you! In the mouth!”

A hand dips down to cover his face dramatically, eyes blown in a show of over-dramatics. Looking around as if nervous that other people might hear, he whispers- “With your mouth?”

They both start laughing now, Issa chucking the stuffed whale directly at his face, which prompts him to reach up and try to throw his blanket down, though he gets tangled in the sheets and very nearly falls, which makes them both laugh even harder. At one point- and neither of them are sure how long this has been going on, Issa clambers out of bed to start throwing more stuffed animals at him, picking one up from their bedside table and hitting him squarely in the jaw. Mouth agape, he climbs down the ladder with a pillow, making to fight her.

This is all interrupted when someone knocks on the door and, stifling giggles, Issa moves to answer it.

“Yeah?”

Elena stands there, blearily rubbing at her eyes, a frown planted onto her mouth where there might usually be a smug smile. They stare up at Issa- looking up because they’re slouching, and Issa’s grip on the doorknob tightens. 

“Can you- for the love of god- please be quiet? For once? Do you know what time it is?”

Max, peering from behind Issa’s shoulder, chimes in. “No, do you?”

“No, but it’s, like, ass-o’cock-” they run a hand over their face. “Ass-o’clock in the morning, and I have a history exam tomorrow, so I’d like to try and get some sleep. You definitely aren’t helping.”

“When have I ever helped you, though?” Issa says, still cheery despite the interruption. Max laughs and quickly disguises it as a cough.

“You think you’re so funny, don’t you?”

“And I’m right,” she smiles. “Oh, and Lena, before you go, just wondering, do you have a crush on anyone?”

Elena scowls. “None of your business, whore,” and the door slams shut in Issa’s face.

-

Friday, after class, Issa swings the door of the clubroom open and is immediately pointed at by Wren. 

“You. What Shakespearean heroine would you be?”

“Heroin?” Emma says, hiding a laugh behind their book, and Zoe hits them on the shoulder. 

Issa thinks about it as she closes the door behind her, ducking while Percy, from the corner, tries to hit her with a balled up piece of paper, presumably from a copy of War and Peace that had been left behind. “Maybe… I dunno, I like Viola.”

“Good choice!” Max calls out from where he sits behind what used to be the teacher’s desk, but has been turned into a footrest by most of the club members. “Very gender.”

She bows. “Thanks, king.”

“Caught up in a love triangle?” Elena says, sitting on the desk next to where Max has kicked up his feet. She leans back onto her hands, only casting the cursory glance at Issa every now and then.

“Maybe she was thinking about the gender,” Wren offers. “The way she closed the door was GNC AF.”

Issa laughs. “You’re insane! I was just closing a door, what the hell could be GNC about that? I wasn’t really thinking about the love triangle, more like the proximity to hot gay friends.”

Wren’s face crinkles, but Zoe snaps, catching Issa’s eye, before pointing finger guns her way, that Issa quickly reciprocates. Theo and Orlando, who have been busy feeding the shrimp in the club fish-tank, turn around at the same time to look at her.

“Hot?” they both ask, identical in tone, and Issa rolls her eyes. 

“First of all, I said what I said. Second of all, clones are last season, get over it.”

Theo gasps in mock offense. “Last season? I don’t think my little clone baby would appreciate hearing that.” Orlando shakes his head.

Audrey, being Audrey, interjects into the conversation, appearing behind Issa, who is still caught in front of the doorframe. “Hot friends, huh?”

Issa jumps out of the way, further back to about where Elena and Max are. “As if! Hot? You?”

“She’s pretty objectively hot,” Elena says, and Issa startles again, jumping and landing with her hands on her knees. She laughs.

“You’ve both gotta stop scaring the hell outta me. I’m one girl. I can barely take being caught in the middle of-”

“A love triangle?” June asks, seeming to only pay half of her attention as she rummages through her bag for something. “Maybe you really are Viola.”

“Don’t,” Max groans. “I can’t even think about a play that isn’t Hamlet right now. If I let my brain get attached to Twelfth Night again, I won’t be able to direct the production next semester properly.”

“Hamlet but instead of Hamlet it’s Viola,” Lucy chimes in, and June puts her head in her hands.

“I feel like Viola would be able to deal with the Ophelia-Horatio triangle better. And she wouldn’t kill anyone. She wouldn’t be meta-cognitive.”

“No!” Percy says, rushing over to slap a hand over June’s mouth. “We’re not doing this again! We are not doing this again!”

But Issa, who has slid down the blackboard so that she’s sitting against the old wall of the classroom, has her mind elsewhere.

Why had she said Viola?

Viola, caught in a love triangle, stuck in between a rock and a hard place, one person insufferable and the other even worse- or, no. She’s forgotten the plot of Twelfth Night again. 

Perhaps she’s projecting.

-

“Okay, seriously,” she says to Elena over the weekend, catching up to them as they make their way to the library.

“Oh my god-!” they gasp. “Don’t ‘okay, seriously’ me, can you at least, like, fucking warn me before you go and give me a heart attack?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry,” Issa waves dismissively, and Elena scowls at her. “I was just- is it okay if I join you, by the way?”

“Sure, whatever.”

“Cool. I was just… Like, I really wanted to know if you did actually have a crush on someone.”

“And I really wanted you to know that it was none of your business.” They turn their nose up at her. “Whore.”

“I’m not a whore, you’ve gotta stop using that as a catch-all descriptor.”

“I mean it affectionately.”

“Affectionately?” Issa grins, cat-like, and bumps her shoulder into theirs. “Am I the mysterious someone you’ve got a crush on?”

“Please,” Elena says. “I’ve got standards.”

“Do you?”

“If I didn’t, I’d be dating you already.”

A beat.

“Thanks?”

“It’s not a compliment, I just mean that you’re easy pickings for someone as hot and sexy as I am.”

Issa puts a hand on her chin as they make the turn into the library, hemming and hawing as if contemplating something truly difficult to understand. The librarian looks up from the argument she’s having with Tal and shushes her, which Issa sheepishly waves at in response. “I guess you’re pretty hot and sexy.”

“You guess? Just a guess? I am pretty, hot, and sexy.”

“No, idiot, you’re pretty hot- as in just a little hot- and pretty sexy. Same thing.”

Elena puts her bookbag down at a free table and Issa takes it as an invitation to sit across from her. “Pretty-sexy is something I’m more than happy to call myself. By the way, I’m here to study, so don’t bother interrupting me once I’ve got my book out.”

“I wouldn’t dare!” Issa announces, earning another nasty stare from the librarian. “I wouldn’t dare,” she repeats, at which point Audrey enters the library, catching her eye from the entrance and immediately walking over. “Her, on the other hand…”

With an air of excess confidence, she puts a stack of papers onto the table. “Thought you wouldn’t be able to function without me. Sorry for crashing the party.”

Elena rolls her eyes and shoves a paper off the top of the stack. “Too little too late. You could’ve just, like, not come here.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” Audrey sits down at the head of the table and leans forward onto her hands. “I think you both need me around.”

Issa digs through her pencil case, pulling out an eraser that she hucks at Audrey’s forehead. “Can’t speak for Lena, but god forbid I ever come around to you.”

“You ever come-” Audrey starts, and Elena shushes her forcefully, pulling out a textbook and annotating in the margins with a pencil that she must have stolen, since Issa hasn’t seen her using it in class before. 

“I don’t want to hear you making gross-ass jokes while I’m studying, please. If I fill in the quiz tomorrow and answer ‘come around’ for any of the questions, that’s your head on a pike.”

“My head?” Audrey says again, and Issa picks up the nub of an eraser that June had abandoned and given to her, throwing it at Audrey one more time for good measure. 

-

“Huh,” Issa says, staring at the arched ceiling of the holding room while the other members of her theatre class run scenes onstage. Zoe looks over, peering up at the ceiling, seeing nothing new- maybe a new cobweb, maybe new specks of dust that float down from the overhead, maybe a balloon had gotten stuck up there and was starting to deflate. Nothing catches her interest.

“What?”

“I think I have a crush on someone.”

-  
Issa doesn’t enjoy liking people. Not really.

Staring up at the bottom of Max’s bed instead of studying is something that she’d be doing on a weeknight anyway, but she’d rather be unbothered than busy thinking about a certain someone- or certain someone-s, for that matter. In any case, she kicks her feet up onto the wood planks under his mattress, which seems to alert him from across the room.

“Don’t mess with my mattress, you know we’re not strong enough to lift that thing back up if it falls.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’m think-fidgeting.”

“Think-fidgeting? About what?”

“I think I figured out who I have a crush on.”

“Oh!” Max says, and he turns around in his chair to look at her. His expression is unreadable. “You gonna tell them?”

“Yeah,” she says, and runs a hand over her face. “Yeah. I’m gonna tell them.”

What she leaves out is the addition to the sentence. She’s going to tell them- plural.

-

“‘Scuse me,” Issa says, knocking on the desk that Audrey’s chosen to half-listen to Lucy’s rambling in, and Audrey perks up, clocking Issa and Elena, standing awkwardly behind her, playing with the edge of their tie mindlessly. “Gotta pull you outta this club meeting. Got something to discuss.”

Outside the room, Elena and Audrey share a look while Issa makes sure that the hallway is mostly clear, leaning against the wall.

“Well, madam secretary? Are we in trouble?” Elena says, crossing their arms. “Did we, like, forget to pay the non-existent club fee?”

“Yeah,” Audrey chimes in. “Not enough copies of War and Peace for everyone this week? You use up the last one on a joint?”

“Just one joint?” Issa says, appalled. “I haven’t read that absolute nightmare of a book, but in terms of joints, you could probably feed a family of five.”

“A family of five stoners,” Elena says.

“Right, a family of five stoners.” Issa shakes her head. “But that’s not why I brought you assholes out here!”

Audrey quirks an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t have guessed. You mean you didn’t just want to wax philosophical about how many joints would feed a family of five!”

“Shut up!” Issa says. “I don’t know why I like you, jesus christ!”

“You like me?” Audrey says, and Elena gasps in mock surprise. 

“You like her? How could we have possibly known? The way you beg for her attention is simply so platonic, I-!”

Issa cuts her off. “I like you too, whore. Don’t assume I dragged you out here to be the witness at my wedding.”

“Wedding?” Audrey interjects again. “Don’t you think we’re moving a little fast?”

“You know what I meant,” Issa says, swatting at her shoulder. “I just mean, like, I don’t know. I… I don’t know, I think it’s… We have a good dynamic, a good rapport, and- Christ, this is getting too real! I just think you’re both really funny, and I’m also- I’m also really funny, and we have a good thing going and… Listen, you don’t have to… You don’t have to reciprocate or whatever, I just thought it would be unfair if I didn’t tell you both, so I’m here to let you know that I like… both of you. I like-like both of you. And that’s it. You can rejoin the club now, or whatever-”

Elena cuts her off. “Hey. I don’t know about the 10-foot-tall-rat over here, but you can, like, relax. I wouldn’t keep you around if I didn’t at least like you a little bit too. And her, I guess, but she’s kind of a bitch, so I’ll keep her name out of my mouth.”

“Me being a bitch is what makes me lovable,” Audrey says with a smile. “But anyway, I’ve gotta think about this. Not because I don’t like you both, but because I have a reputation of whorishness that I have to uphold, and being in relationship would mess with that. It would mess with it pretty hard.”

Issa pauses, then starts laughing, pulling both of them into a bone crushing hug.

“I said it, but god, I don’t know why I like you both so much!”

“But you do?” Elena says.

“But I do.”


End file.
